While attending CES 2017 in Las Vegas, I spent a lot of time meandering around slot machines looking for meeting rooms, restaurants and taxi stands. I couldn’t help but think that casinos and other large hotels would benefit from a far superior customer experience akin to the indoor navigation technology used by Carnival's Ocean Medallion project. This project, announced in the CES keynote, provides not only better navigation, but also personalized service, tailored recommendations and many other guest benefits.

My company has been involved with its development and, much as the Magic Band allows Disney to provide improved visitor experiences in Orlando, the Ocean Medallion improves cruising by providing numerous, personalized guest experiences.

Although both companies employ the use of a wearable device to achieve their goals, their actual goals have nothing to do with wearables or with technology. At their core, both companies are striving to provide a better experience for their customers. “Better” can mean a lot of things: reduced frustration, offerings tailored to individual tastes, better entertainment, etc.

None of these are specific to theme parks or to cruising. Who wouldn’t want these benefits in every aspect of their life? Think about bad customer experiences and how they might benefit from similar thinking.

Fundamental Principles Of A Good Customer Experience

In many ways, there’s very little difference between a large ship and any large building, or even a small city. The guest experience concepts that lie at the heart of this project are also applicable to smart hotels, smart hospitals, smart buildings and smart cities. Among these are:

Respect the guest/customer as an individual. Rather than trying to segment customers into broad categories, the Carnival project treats each guest as a “segment of one." The key is to discover the individual preferences of your customers and use that information to improve guest experiences. Mass mailings and generic promotions driven by generalized demographic data do not result in quality experiences.

Take the opportunity to “surprise and delight” the customer. Just as a bad experience is memorable, an unexpected good experience can make a journey unforgettable. This could mean creating novel new experiences for customers, but also basic things -- in the case of a cruise, it could be as simple as remembering a guest's favorite drink.

Develop long-term relationships. On a recent cruise of my own (my seventh), I met many passengers who had cruised 20 or more times. One couple was on their 82nd cruise! Carnival is using an IoT network to remember crucial customer details and preferences across multiple cruises and even cruise lines. Hotels, hospitals, buildings and even smart cities can use similar technology to build relationships with their customers over time.

Can other brands apply these same concepts to improve the customer experience, such as hotels, hospitals, buildings and cities? Absolutely, because their customer journeys all face similar challenges. We use what we call the “PAER” (Plan, Arrive, Experience, Remember) framework to consider the various ways that a customer interacts with a company and to explore how each contributes to the overall experience.

Although we've mostly applied this framework to the entertainment and hospitality business, you could easily apply this thinking to healthcare, building and government interactions. Consider:

Plan: Reserving a room with a consistent rate; making a doctor’s appointment sooner than two weeks in the future; scheduling an unused conference room; renewing your driver’s license in less than an hour.

Arrive: Checking into the hotel in under five minutes; seeing your doctor without first having to answer the same questions you always have to answer; quickly finding a place to park; easily figuring out which department to visit in City Hall.

Experience: Ordering room service that arrives promptly; being attended by a doctor who knows something about you; holding a meeting in a well-equipped room with a projector/screen that works; receiving clear answers to your questions about your property assessment.

Remember: Your hotel sending you the glasses you forgot in your room; being able to easily look up your medical records; not having to re-apply as a “visitor” next time you return to a client’s office; your mayor following-up to a question you posed online.

I don’t think that I’m exaggerating in making these parallels. I think that customers will increasingly value good experiences and will pay a premium for them.